Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Listen!” he said. “Is that for you?”

“I suppose so,” she answered absent-mindedly.

“You’ve got them eating out of your hand!” he cried joyously. “Go on out there!”

“No,” she said. “This is my last show. I was married this afternoon.”

In the dim light his face was a cipher to her. “Now? You’re going to quit now? After all I’ve done for you? I didn’t think it was in you to act like this!”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “It’s love, Jack, love! Do you want to know why I went over so immense just now? He was out front. I wasn’t acting, I was living my number.”

“I give you a year of that,” he called after her. “They all come back.”

“Good night, Miss Grayson,” the doorman said.

She smiled and opened her purse. “It’s Mrs. Martin now, Dave, and it’s good-by.”

He watched her step out into the alley under the dim light and walk away on her husband’s arm.

The flat (Brooklyn because “Where else could you get it for fifty-five?”) had a shining white refrigerator that purred like a kitten and made little frozen dice in a pan. It had a radio that hissed and spit if anyone crossed the floor in front of it but at other times poured forth the sweetest music mortal ears had ever heard. Furthermore, it had a dumbwaiter that miraculously disgorged itself of cans of peaches and cartons of cigarettes while a voice hidden somewhere in the bowels of the earth called up “Four seventy-five, please!” Zelda, used to hotel rooms all her life, brought no caustic comment to bear on ten cent cups and saucers and a sofa secured by a five dollar deposit; found in them the essence of the ideal, and crowed delightedly at the implication of personal ownership in all this. The lily needed no gilding, but for ornament there were her own striking wrappers and the Chinese lanterns she conscientiously fastened to all the lights.

The first weeks went by in a flurry of excitement. There were things to be bought. There were things to be done, things to be learned. How to make coffee, for instance. The only way she had known was to pick up a telephone and say “Room service.” And over and above all this there was love, breathless and absorbing. Until weeks grew into months and the excitement was less. Love did not grow less, but the excitement did.

Hers was to be no busman’s holiday. She stayed away from the places she had known. No more midnight lunches in restaurants filled with shop-talk. No more of friends who called her “honey” but would have cut her throat professionally. Once her costumer called her. “It’s all of silver fish-scales and just the thing for you. Lily de Vrie is wild about it, but I thought I’d give you first chance at it.”

“Let her have it,” Zelda said. “Haven’t you heard that I’ve quit?”

She didn’t want gold or silver or anything shining any more. Her eyes were a little tired of glitter. Diversion was to sit in a room, her very own room, with him there, with a lamp and a book and a cigarette there, and not have to sing for people, not have to smile. And if one stocking slowly dropped below her knee, it was luxury; it was better than a diamond-studded garter. She took pride in demonstrating her newest accomplishment now, made a cup of coffee as a special treat just before they retired, while the announcer’s voice was signing off to soft far-away music. If they had drained the pitcher of cream between them, she would scrawl a little note, “Borden: Leave us a bottle of cream tomorrow,” and curl it up in the neck of a bottle outside the door.

A few of Marty’s friends came out from time to time. She wanted to like them, tried to make them feel at home, but they invariably asked her to sing, entertain them in some way.

“I have a headache,” she would say. “Not just tonight, some other time.” They seemed to feel they had been snubbed.

“Don’t let’s have them any more,” she pleaded. “They’re always asking me to perform.”

“I’m afraid you don’t like my friends,” he said.

“They keep an imaginary spotlight on me all the time. If I walk into the room to say hello to them, they make an ‘entrance’ out of it somehow. They stop being just callers and turn into an audience right away. They want a show.”

“But I thought you liked the stage—”

“The stage is just a habit, and now I’ve broken the habit. Think what it means, to stay in one place all the time, to forget there are things like trunks and trains and eight o’clock shows.” She raised her chin as though it hurt. “See these little lines here? I had them when I was seventeen. I’m not old, but I’m so tired—”

She was a little different now from what she had been when he first saw her. And soon she was a whole lot different. He couldn’t understand what had happened. Every evening, rushing home under the East River in a crowded train, he thought of her as she had been, in the heart of that electric moon, a two-dimensional being, a product of lights and music, a stage effect, but bringing beauty into his life and his heart, a warmth that would linger there for the rest of his days. And every evening, when he got there and opened the door, he saw her as she was. It was a little hard to fit the two together. He thought: “Did I marry this girl? What is this girl doing here?” He couldn’t think of her in a kimono, loose ends of hair straggling about her head, sitting, drinking coffee from a thick cup. Couldn’t think of her that way at all. And one Sunday morning, as though seeing her for the first time, he said: “Why, you’re no different from anyone else this way.”

She sighed and said: “Do I have to be different? Can’t you take me as I am?”

And at another, later time she said: “I know. You wouldn’t have married me if you had known I would turn into a washout like this.”

“It isn’t that—” he said. “It isn’t that—” She had no right to read his thoughts that way.

But it was that. He knew it and she knew it too.

She had a little plan then. She would look as he wanted her to. He would come home and find the glamorous thing he had married waiting for him. She spent the afternoon getting ready. Had a wave put in her hair. A little perfume but heavy enough to cut with a knife. New eyes, new lips, new lashes, out of little boxes. A baby chandelier dangling from each ear. She saw herself in the glass. “How cheap I look,” she said. Men were funny. Maybe she would have to do this once or twice a week. But after she had taken it all off again, there would always be the radio and coffee, each time.

She slipped her hand through one more sparkling paste bracelet for luck. Then the telephone rang. He wasn’t coming. They were taking an inventory of stock, get away as soon as he could. She sat down abruptly on a chair and laughed for a very long time. She sat there holding a hand to her head and laughing. They really did those things, then, in everyday life. Rang up home and said they were detained by business when they wanted to take someone else out to dinner. She hadn’t believed it until now, thought it just a married-life “gag.” One of those funny-paper jokes. Now it seemed it wasn’t. She understood, of course. She knew by his very voice. Probably one of the salesgirls. She shook her head tenderly, was not at all hard-boiled. “Poor Marty. Poor boy. Got to have someone to dream about.”

And what about all this she had on? Simply because she felt unequal to the bother of taking it all off again so soon, she got up after a while and languidly called her old theater.

“How’s the new show going these days, Jack? I have a hunch I’ll drop around tonight. Leave a pass for me in the box-office.” Then she boiled herself a cup of coffee and sighed lugubriously. Anyone that would want to leave a cozy flat like this even for an hour must be a fool.